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Economy and Psychology

The podcasts and blogs below are produced by professionals with extensive experience working in their respective fields as a psychotherapist and an economist. Here they combine what they have learned to explore how the twin crises of the US economy and our psychology interact today. Isolation, anxiety, loneliness, and depression are psychological issues that profoundly impact work, consumption, and debt. Likewise, unemployment, income inequality, and exploitation shape our emotional and intimate lives. The interaction of economy and psychology helps to determine our society and our individuality as well. Yet these topics remain loaded with taboos, confusions, ignorance, and fear preventing us from asking big questions and daring to discuss big answers. Getting past these limits to explore economics, psychology, and their mutual influence is our goal and purpose.

Podcasts

This conversation seeks to explore some relatively ignored economic, psychological and cultural causes of the Newtown school killings, their context in our nation's culture, and their implications for our future.

Everyone from the candidates to the parties to observers and voters are making their respective senses of what the election results mean. Here we offer a psychological and economic analysis of an election dominated by what people were voting against and how they reacted to remarkably divisive claims made especially by the Romney and Republican forces.

The traditional family is a declining institution in contemporary society. The profit-driven processes and recurring crises of capitalism are major causes of that decline. Nostalgic appeals for the return of traditional families may be clever politics, playing on the pain of declining families, but capitalism blocks that return. We thus now need to engage the long-overdue discussion of alternative family structures and alternative economic systems.

More important than pathologizing the individual who killed is the task of evaluating the social and psychological conditions - changable by collective action - that can explain why his frustrations and failures should take such a violent turn against others. In other words, why does the US have more such violent, gun-using explosions of extreme personal upset than most other advanced countries combined?

Secure, stable jobs gave way to precarious employment over recent decades - and especially during the crisis that started in 2007. Precarious work has dubious benefits for employers and imposes huge economic costs on society and huge human costs on most working people. Precarity exposes capitalism's irrationality and shows the importance of non-capitalist alternatives like the workers' cooperatives organized in Spain's Mondragon Corporation.

Over 50 % of today's adults in the US live singly, what a 2012 book by Eric Klinenberg calls Going Solo. We discuss why that happened, the deep loneliness involved, its relationship to modern capitalism, and why basic social change is crucial to overcoming today's isolations.

Around facts of unemployment, people living alone, children and the elderly, we discuss how differently the 1% and the 99% experience capitalism’s crisis. The 1% and their government have ignored widespread suffering and social costs that react back upon capitalism negatively. Yet massive government support goes mostly to the top banks and other corporations that threaten that they are “too big to fail.” Capitalism has proven to be an unjust, inefficient, and self-destructive system.

We discuss how the tiny top and the increased bottom of the US economic system have very differently experienced economic crisis since 2007. We suggest some specific programs urgently needed and also draw some lessons about what basically has to change.

Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart,is criticized as a "blame-the-victim" argument applied to the white working class just as Patrick Moynihan applied it to the African-American working class in the 1960s. Murray excludes and thereby exonerates the economic system from responsibility for working class suffering and dysfunction; he blames instead character flaws somehow newly developed in that class.We develop a counterargument that locates the behaviors of both the 1% and the 99% in their logical responses to a dysfunctional economic system.

While hope is an elusive reality, it is crucial for our personal lives and in society. Hope destroyed leads to decline and desperation. Hope rekindled - think Obama in 2008 and Occupy Wall Street today - is a powerful social and personal force.

A crucial fact going into the 2012 election was this: from October 2010 to October 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that average real wages of non-supervisory workers fell by 2.4 per cent.

Competing self-congratulations by political and utility company leaders - about how wonderfully they and the "first responders" performed in the wake of Sandy's floods and power outages - serve to hide very serious and dangerous failures to anticipate, pre

The latest employment report (for July 2012) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in Washington documents the utter failure of the political establishment to respond effectively to the crisis that began in December 2007.